Longtime friend and collaborator Tom Scott said he received a call around 1pm on Sunday to say Ball had passed away.

It's understood Ball had been suffering from Alzheimer's and had been nursed at his Gisborne home for some time. He is survived by his wife Pam, and children.

Footrot Flats stars Wal and Dog.

Scott, a cartoonist who was also born in Ball's hometown of Feilding, said Ball had given him his first break more than 30 years ago when he asked him to write a script for Footrot Flats, the movie.

“He was a hero of mine when I was growing up in the Manawatu. It was tremendous to think these great cartoons could be created by someone living just up the road, the didn't need to be things done overseas.”

Scott said a lot of of Ball's work was “fiercely political and fiercely egalitarian”.

“Those were Murray's two passion, he was passionate about injustice.”

Murray Ball with wife Pam at his Gisborne home and his three dogs. — Photograph: Brett Mead.

Scott said he worked with Ball on the script for 1986 film Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tale for two years, fine tuning the story of Wal and Dog.

Scott also recalled watching Ball play rugby for Manawatu against the touring Lions team in 1959.

“He was a sporting hero, he was a creative hero and then when I met him he was a hero of a man.”

Although mainly known down-under for his iconic cartoon strip Footrot Flats, Murray Ball initially worked as a journalist for the Manawatu Times and The Dominion newspapers before becoming a freelance cartoonist and moving to Scotland. While there, he created his Stanley cartoon strip, which was published by Punch for many years. It became the longest-running cartoon strip ever to appear in Punch and Murray continued to draw it long after he moved back to New Zealand and settled in the Gisborne area, from where he created Footrot Flats.

The Ball family owned a farm at the end of Shelly Road on the outskirts of Gisborne and over a long period of time, Murray planted large parts of the farm in native forest and retired it from farming operations. Their farm contained The Town Hill (with the summit at 290 metres above sea level) and over many years, Murray laboured away at constructing a walking track which gradually climbed up to the summit, then descended via a different route through a number of bush-covered gullies. In the early 1990s, Murray opened the walkway to the public in partnership with the Department of Conservation. The view from the summit of The Town Hill is simply stunning, looking out over the city and Poverty Bay.

Footrot Flats creator Murray Ball gave cartoonist Tom Scottthe courage first to draw cartoons, and so much more.

By TOM SCOTT | 5:00AM - Tuesday, 14 March 2017

Murray Ball with his dog, Finn, in 1993. — Photograph: Bill Kearns.

I WAS a primary school boy sitting on a plank of wood on the muddy sideline and didn't realise it at the time, but I first gazed upon Murray Ball one winter's afternoon in 1959 at the Palmerston North show grounds when the Junior All Black and son of an All Black marked the great, snorting, prancing Irish and British Lions winger, Tony O'Reilly, who was half man, half racehorse.

“Mostly O'Reilly beat me with sheer pace on the outside,” sighed Murray years later when I reminded him of the thumping Manawatu received, “Other times he sidestepped inside me. And then when he got bored with that he just ran over the top of me.”

Most rugby players get better and better in fond recall, but not Murray. Typically his nostalgia trode a fine line between lacerating honesty and mocking self-deprecation.

I remember still the exhilaration I felt when I stumbled across Murray's early editorial cartoons in the long-extinct Manawatu Times. They were nothing like the stolid, insipid, reactionary offering in other newspapers.

They burst off the page with a rude energy and undeniable humanity. Imagine a Giles cartoon if Giles had dropped acid.

And best of all they were drawn by somebody from Feilding, my home town.

If you wanted to be a rock star back then it was a hopeless cause unless you came from Liverpool.

Actually, if you wanted to be anything coming from Feilding made everything a hopeless cause, until quite literally at the stroke of a pen, Murray opened up possibilities.

Those possibilities expanded exponentially when seemingly overnight comic strips by Murray began surfacing in British publications.

Stanley the Paleolithic philosopher who graced the pages of Punch magazine for many years was clearly the work of someone of astonishing wit and fierce intelligence.

The black shearer's singlet wearing Bruce the Barbarian who appeared in a Left-wing journal was clearly the work of someone fiercely egalitarian.

If it is possible to be too egalitarian, Murray most certainly was.

Injustice and unfairness burn him and as a consequence the fruits of his success always made him uncomfortable.

Tom Scott's tribute cartoon to his friend and mentor, Murray Ball.

When the imperfections of the real world bore down on him he departed England and retreated to a remote and beautiful part of New Zealand where he created a perfect world of his own, Footrot Flats.

Even here though, much like the terrifying croco-pigs in his movie Footrot Flats — The Dog's Tale, the familiar brutal honesty lurked beneath the surface.

Being invited by Murray to co-write that film with him was a turning point in my life.

To be asked was an honour in itself and to have the film succeed on both sides of the Tasman gave me the courage to write screenplays and stage plays of my own.

Through all weathers, in all seasons and over time in Footrot Flats Murray created a world every bit as delicate and true as a Katherine Mansfield short story, every bit as visceral and unsentimental as a Ronald Hugh Morrieson or Barry Crump novel, every bit as whimsical and nonsensical as a John Clarke or Billy T James comedy routine (both of whom appeared in his film) and visually every bit as arresting and instantly recognisable as a Rita Angus or Toss Woollaston painting.

Rock and roll guitarist Chuck Berry performs his “duck walk” as he plays his electric hollowbody guitar at the TAMI Show on December 29th, 1964at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California. Other performers included James Browm, The Rolling Stones, The Beatlesand Jan & Dean. — Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

CHUCK BERRY, a founding father of rock 'n' roll who designed much of the music's sonic blueprint and became his era's most creative lyricist, has died. He was 90.

In hits such as “Maybellene”, “Johnny B. Goode” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, Berry paired clarion guitar riffs and a relentlessly rhythmic blend of blues and country with buoyant vignettes celebrating teenage life and the freedom of 1950s America.

“He laid down the law for playing this kind of music,” Eric Clapton once said. John Lennon’s succinct summation: “If you tried to give rock 'n' roll another name, you might call it ChuckBerry.” The Encyclopedia of Popular Music states that Berry's influence as guitarist and songwriter is “incalculable.”

At a time when rock 'n' roll lyrics were secondary to the sound of the records, Berry's sophisticated depictions of adolescence — school, cars, growing up, courtship, the onset of adulthood — showed for the first time that the music could mirror and articulate the experience of a generation. In the mid-1950s, only the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller worked similar territory.

Despite his profound musical influence, Berry's legacy is forever entwined with three high-profile scrapes with the law — he served time for armed robbery when he was a teenager, a violation of the Mann Act in 1962, and income tax evasion in 1979.

Those experiences, particularly the Mann Act conviction, are widely regarded as contributors to the guarded, difficult nature of Berry's personality. He wrote an autobiography in 1987 and performed regularly for most of his life, but Berry granted few interviews and rarely revealed much of himself. In director Taylor Hackford's 1987 documentary Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, he is a complex character, alternately charming and controlling.

Berry had six Top 10 hits from 1955 through 1964, and was a dynamic force on the frenzied rock 'n' roll tours of the '50s, with his piercing gaze and famous “duck walk,” in which he crouched low and scooted across the stage with one leg extended and his guitar held high.

A host of followers embraced his sound and songs. The early albums and concerts of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were peppered with such Berry works as “Rock & Roll Music”, “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Carol” and “Around and Around”. Their British Invasion peers, including the Animals and the Kinks, were similarly under his spell.

His fellow Americans were no less impressed. Berry's “Memphis” became a hit for both Lonnie Mack (an instrumental version) and Johnny Rivers. The rapid phrasing and energy of “Too Much Monkey Business” was a model for Bob Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

The honor wasn't always acknowledged. The Beach Boys' 1963 hit “Surfin' U.S.A.” was a near-copy of “Sweet Little Sixteen”. Berry, watchful over every dollar due, sued and won co-writing credit.

Similarly, the opening lines of the Beatles' “Come Together” were close enough to a lyric from “You Can't Catch Me” (“Here come up flattop, he was movin' up with me”) that Berry brought legal action and won a settlement.

Berry was part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's inaugural induction class in 1986. He received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 1984, was named to the Kennedy Center Honors in 2000 and received Sweden’s prestigious Polar music prize in 2014.

A recording of “Johnny B. Goode” was included among the cultural artifacts installed on the two Voyager space probes launched in 1977. On a subsequent “Saturday Night Live” sketch, comedian Steve Martin reported on the first communication from distant aliens: “Send more Chuck Berry”.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born October 18th, 1926, in St. Louis, one of six children. His mother, Martha, was a teacher and his father, Henry, was a carpenter whose enthusiasm for poetry and other literature made a deep impression on his children.

The family enjoyed a relatively comfortable life in the black neighborhood known as the Ville, but Berry did encounter racism in other parts of town — he once recalled being turned away from the Fox Theatre downtown when he tried to buy a movie ticket.

Berry sang in a choir at a Baptist church and in the high school glee club. His taste for entertaining was sharpened when he turned in a well-received performance of “Confessin' the Blues” at a high school talent show, and he soon took up the guitar.

When Berry was 17, he and two friends stole a car and robbed three businesses in Kansas City, Missouri. Berry received the maximum sentence of 10 years. Inside the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men in Algoa, Missouri, he sang in a gospel group and learned to box, and was released after serving three years.

Back in St. Louis, he worked at an auto plant and as a hairdresser, and supplemented his income by playing guitar in local bands. He married in 1948, and he and his wife Themetta (Toddy) would have four children.

Berry admired traditional pop standards and such singers as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and he loved big-band music and jump blues, especially the entertaining, often comedic brand of Louis Jordan. Jordan's guitarist Carl Hogan was one of Berry’s instrumental models, along with Charlie Christian and blues stars Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker.

Berry joined the Sir John Trio in 1952, teaming for the first time with pianist Johnnie Johnson, who would become an indispensable sideman on Berry's records. They performed blues and ballads, and also adapted country tunes into a “black hillbilly” style that proved very popular. They started drawing big crowds at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, Illinois, and the band's name was soon changed to the Chuck Berry Trio as the singer-guitarist asserted his dominance.

In 1955, Berry headed to Chicago to meet one of his heroes, Muddy Waters. After a show, Berry got an autograph from the blues great, and asked for advice about making a record. Waters told him to contact Leonard Chess, the head of the famed blues label Chess Records.

Berry did, and returned in a week with a demo tape. Chess took the trio into the studio and drove them through repeated takes of “Ida Mae”, Berry's reworking of the folk tune “Ida Red”. Chess thought it had potential, but he had problems with the title. A box of mascara on a windowsill gave him his inspiration, and he renamed the tune “Maybellene”.

The record came out in July 1955 and reached No.5 on the pop singles chart. The success was accompanied by a cold slap of reality. The songwriting credit on the record went not to Berry alone, but also to influential disc jockey Alan Freed and to the owner of the building that housed Chess Records. Such maneuvers were common in the record business then, but Berry was taken aback. After a long fight, he was finally granted sole credit in 1986.

Their common thread was the exuberance of Berry's sound and his vivid, lively language. His lyrics chronicled youthful culture with a keen, pithy eye, and his characters were constantly in motion, either around the dance floor, across the map, on the highway — inevitably in a Coupe de Ville, a V8 Ford, a “coffee colored Cadillac” or some other big American car.

Singing with a sharp, precise enunciation, he could drop in a French phrase, coin words such as “motor-vatin,” and craft indelible images — describing a girl who “wiggles like a glowworm, dance like a spinning top,” or colorfully capturing the excitement of rock 'n' roll: “You know my temperature's risin'/And the jukebox blowin’ a fuse …”

Despite being stung by racial prejudice in his life, Berry basked in a positive vision of his country in his songs. “New York, Los Angeles, oh how I yearn for you,” he sang in “Back in the U.S.A”. longing from abroad for the place “where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.”

Berry also tested the waters of social commentary. “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”, a playful but potent statement of racial pride, opened with the wry, “arrested on charges of unemployment …”

And “Too Much Monkey Business”, with its torrent of complaints (“Runnin' to and from/Hard workin' at the mill/Never fail in the mail/Yeah, come a rotten bill”), expressed the frustrations of a beleaguered breadwinner with a comical edge.

Berry showed that pop could be art, but he always insisted he was being merely pragmatic.

“I wrote about cars because half the people had cars, or wanted them,” he said in a 2002 interview with London's Independent newspaper. “I wrote about love, because everyone wants that. I wrote songs white people could buy, because that’s nine pennies out of every dime. That was my goal: to look at my bank book and see a million dollars there.”

Berry had opened a nightclub and was riding high in 1959 when he was charged with violating the Mann Act, a federal law that prohibits the interstate transport of women for “immoral purposes.” The prosecution stemmed from Berry's relationship with 14-year-old Janice Escalante, whom he had met in Juarez, Mexico, and brought to St. Louis. When he fired her from her job as a hat checker at the club, she went to the police.

Berry's first conviction was voided because of racially based misconduct by the judge, but he was convicted in a second trial and sentenced to three years in prison in October 1961.

Many felt that Berry’s race and his history of relationships with white women were a factor in the prosecution. Racial dynamics would be a subtext throughout his career, in which he helped bring down the black-white divisions in popular music and specifically set out to appeal to a white audience.

“He was a rebel, a guy who was incredibly complex, unbelievably thorny, and through his own headstrong nature and his own appetites was truly punished for his rebellion,” said Hackford, who formed a stormy relationship with Berry when he directed the 1987 documentary.

“He had the audacity to be a black man who wanted to get out there and perform for white kids and seduce white women, and he did, and he was punished for it. … If rock 'n' roll wants to lay claim to the music of rebellion, he led the charge.”

Berry was released after 20 months and returned to the charts with three more notable songs, “Nadine (Is It You?)” “No Particular Place to Go” and “Promised Land”.

That was the end of his significant record-making (his only No.1 hit would come in 1972 with the risqué novelty “My Ding-a-Ling”). But with the British Invasion bringing new attention to his legacy, Berry was a popular touring attraction. He appeared in the famed 1964 TAMI Show concert movie, and as the decade proceeded he adapted to the counterculture's festival and ballroom conventions.

He also collected cars and invested shrewdly in St. Louis real estate, and, less shrewdly, opened an amusement park called Berry Park. When it failed, the estate became Berry's home and headquarters. (“I wanted it to be like Disneyland or Six Flags,” he once said, “but it turned out to be One Flag.”)

In the 1970s he participated in rock 'n' roll revival tours, and after ending his relationship with his longtime band, including pianist Johnson, he began his practice of hiring a local group to wing it behind him in each city. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band once had the honor in their early days, but the overall result was inconsistency, and Berry's reputation suffered.

He played himself in the 1978 film “American Hot Wax”, which told the story of disc jockey Freed. Hackford's documentary, in which Keith Richards led an all-star band behind Berry in concert with such guests as Clapton and Linda Ronstadt, put him back in the spotlight. But though Berry spoke periodically about recording new material, nothing came of it.

But he kept playing, making a monthly appearance at the Blueberry Hill club in St. Louis as recently as this summer.

There were more legal dramas. He served four months in federal prison in Lompoc in 1979 for income tax evasion. In 1990, 60 women sued him for allegedly videotaping them in the bathroom of a restaurant at Berry Park. Berry denied the charges, but paid a settlement. And in 2000 Johnson sued him for royalties and credit, claiming the pianist had co-written Berry's hits. The court ruled against Johnson, who died in 2005.

In the end, Berry hadn't let down his guard.

“This is a guy who will always be an enigma,” said Hackford, “who will always be a mystery, who will always be the ultimate outsider, because he would not let anyone in.”

ON August 9th, 1945, Sumiteru Taniguchi was delivering mail on his bicycle in Nagasaki, Japan. At 11:02 a.m., he noticed a rainbow-like flash and was thrown to the ground.

“When I looked up,” he said in a 1994 interview later broadcast on PBS, “the house I had just passed had been destroyed. The last house to which I distributed mail was still there. I also saw a child blown away. Big stones were flying in the air and one came down and hit me, then flew up again into the sky.”

Mr. Taniguchi, who was 16 at the time, was about one mile from the center of the explosion of the second atomic bomb dropped by U.S. forces on Japan. The city of Hiroshima had been leveled three days earlier. More than 200,000 people were estimated to have been killed in the two blasts.

Within a week of the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to World War II. Mr. Taniguchi's struggles were just beginning.

After a long, painful recovery, he devoted the rest of his life to peace and disarmament, often baring his scars as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear war.

“I realized that I must live on behalf of those who died unwillingly,” he told author Susan Southard for her 2015 book, “Nagasaki”.

Mr. Taniguchi died August 30th in Nagasaki at age 88, according to a statement from a group he helped lead, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The cause was cancer.

As Mr. Taniguchi tried to climb to his feet after the explosion, “the skin of my left arm, from the shoulder to the tip of my fingers, was dripping like rags,” he said. “I put my hand to my back, but there was no clothing. I could only feel something slimy.”

He retrieved the scattered letters from his mailbag.

“I didn't feel any pain and there was no blood,” he said. “But all my energy seemed to vanish.”

He was carried to a grassy spot on a hill and placed alongside other victims.

“When the morning came,” Mr. Taniguchi said in 1994, “no one lying with me was still alive.”

He was not rescued for three days. He was eventually taken to a Japanese military hospital. His skin was stripped away from his back, exposing his muscles. He spent almost two years lying on his stomach, while his back was suppurating with infections.

“The doctors were clueless about how to treat me,” he said.

In January 1946, a film crew from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey came to the hospital and recorded Mr. Taniguchi being treated for his wounds. The three minutes of silent color film were so gruesome that they were not shown in public for more than 25 years.

“From shoulders to waist, his raw, bloodred tissue glistens under the lights,” Southard wrote in “Nagasaki”.

Burns and blisters covered much of the rest of his body.

“He cried every time he heard the instrument cart approaching,” Southard wrote, “and when the nurses removed the gauze from his back, he screamed in pain and begged the nurses to let him die. ‘Kill me, kill me’, he cried.”

In this 2015 photo, Sumiteru Taniguchi shows a photo of himself taken after the 1945 atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki, Japan. — Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press.

Mr. Taniguchi was not released from the hospital until 1949. He later went back to his job as a mail carrier and was not considered completely healed until 1960, although he continued to have medical problems throughout his life. He dealt with keloid scars and tumors and, despite his ramrod straight posture, never went a day without pain.

At a 2010 United Nations conference to review terms of a treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear arms, Mr. Taniguchi held up a picture of himself as a young man, with his back exposed on the hospital bed.

“I am not a guinea pig, nor am I an exhibit,” he said. “But you who are here today, please don't turn your eyes away from me. Please look at me again.”

He became one of several prominent hibakusha, or “atomic bomb-affected people,” who spoke out about their suffering, often despite public ridicule of their disfigurement.

“We never received any professional psychological counseling,” Mr. Taniguchi told The Guardian newspaper of Great Britain in 1988, “but in our group of 60 people we've tried to do it for each other — at least to make the survivors talk about that day. We've saved some people from killing themselves.”

Mr. Taniguchi became a determined advocate for the elimination of nuclear arms. He often traveled overseas to speak at conferences, including in the United States, and called for the Japanese government to pay the medical expenses incurred by the survivors.

He noted that the United States had never shown remorse for the damage caused by atomic weapons, but he was even harsher toward his own country.

“No one in the Japanese government has ever apologized about getting involved in that war, either,” he said.

After the end of World War II, Japan adopted a constitutional provision renouncing war and prohibiting the deployment of military forces outside the country's borders. Amid 70th-anniversary observances of the atomic attacks in 2015, new legislation was passed and signed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe allowing Japanese forces to take part in international conflicts.

Mr. Taniguchi denounced the change in policy, calling it a betrayal of the country's pacifist principles.

“I am worried about what will happen to the world,” he said, “when there are no more atomic bomb survivors.”

Sumiteru Taniguchi was born January 26th, 1929, in Fukuoka, Japan. According to Japanese news reports, his mother died when he was an infant. His father worked for the railroad before being conscripted into the military.

Mr. Taniguchi spent much of his childhood with his maternal parents in Nagasaki before going to work for the postal service at 14.

When he was 24, Mr. Taniguchi had an arranged marriage that was put together by friends and family members.

“My wife never saw me before the wedding and was not told about my injuries,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. “She cried a lot on our honeymoon. It wasn't the scars so much that frightened her, but fear how long I would survive.”

His wife, Eiko, applied lotion to her husband’s scars and massaged his back. She died last year. Survivors include two children; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

In 1986, Southard, who later wrote the book “Nagasaki”, was enlisted as a translator when Mr. Taniguchi came to Washington. She often visited him in Nagasaki and once asked him to describe the significance of his survival, amid such suffering.

“Just that I lived,” he said. “That I have lived this long. I have sadness and struggle that goes with being alive, but I went to the very last edge of life, so I feel joy in the fact that I'm here, now.”

• Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004.

Hillary Clinton has revealed that she paid US$1.6million (NZ$2.2 million) for a home in her New York neighborhood so that Secret Service would have a place to live after she was elected president.

The Democratic hopeful told Jane Pauley during an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning over the weekend that she plunked down the money to purchase her neighbor's home back in August 2016 to make the transition easier come that November, according to Daily Mail.

"I know something about what it takes to move a president and I thought I was going to win," explained Hillary said that she still very much enjoys her second home, despite losing the election just three months after she bought the property.

In fact, it was there that she wrote parts of her new memoir "What Happened", which will be released on Tuesday.

Pauley revealed on Sunday that Clinton wrote the book at the dining room table of her nearby second home, detailing her thoughts on the election she lost to President Donald Trump.

The three-bedroom home sits on 1.5 acres of land and is just feet away from their own property.

With that purchase, the Clintons were also able to establish their Old House Lane homes as a compound and close down the street to local traffic only, with their security detail checking all cars that travel down the road.

The home also has an in-ground pool, stone wall surrounding the yard and a large garden, which Hillary has spoke about working in after her loss last November.

I started the campaign knowing that I was going to have to work extra hard to make women and men feel comfortable with the idea of a woman president," Hillary said of her prospects in the 2016 race.

"It doesn't fit into the stereotype we all carry around in our head. And a lot of the sexism and misogyny was in service of these attitudes like: 'We really don't want a woman commander and chief.'"

Hillary also said during the interview that she will not be seeking elected office again in the wake of her most recent defeat.

"As an active politician, it's over," Hillary told Pauley.

"I am done with being a candidate."

Hillary will kick off her book tour tomorrow with a stop at Barnes & Noble in New York City's Union Square.Nz herald

Her reporting, based on the Panama Papers, made her one ofMalta's most prominent journalists before her death at 53.

By HARRISON SMITH | 9:37PM EDT - Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist who exposed her island nation's links with the so-calledPanama Papers, died when a bomb destroyed her car. — Photograph: Malta Independent/Associated Press.

THE FIRST ATTACK came in 1995, when Daphne Caruana Galizia's front door was doused with fuel and set ablaze. She told her three children that the fire had simply been caused by candles, left outside for too long. Privately, she believed that she was targeted for retaliation. Her collie was killed soon after, left in front of her home with a slit throat.

A reform-minded political columnist, Mrs. Caruana Galizia had written an editorial for the Sunday Times of Malta, her country's largest newspaper, calling for the commander of Malta's armed forces to resign because his children had been linked to drug trafficking.

Fearing for her family's safety, she took her own children out of school and for several weeks stayed away from her home in Bidnija, a small town in the hills of one of Europe's smallest countries.

Nothing more came of the story. But in 2006, shortly after she published an article critical of neo-Nazi groups in Malta, a stack of tires was arranged behind her house and set on fire. “My brother happened to be coming home at night and noticed the fire,” her son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, said in a phone interview. “If he hadn't noticed, we probably would have been burned alive.”

Mrs. Caruana Galizia, who faced what her family described as an escalating series of retaliatory attacks for her independent reporting on Maltese politics, died on October 16th after her Peugeot 108 exploded near her home in Bidnija. She was 53.

Malta police are investigating the case with assistance from the FBI, as requested by Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat. If Mrs. Caruana Galizia is found to have been targeted, she will be the 28th journalist killed for her work this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Forensic experts walk in a field after a powerful bomb blew up a car and killed Mrs. Caruana Galizia. — Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters.

Mrs. Caruana Galizia was in some ways an unassuming muckraker. Though she established herself early in her career as a scorching political commentator, since 2004 she had run Taste & Flair, a lifestyle magazine published by the Malta Independent newspaper.

Writing and editing the magazine's stories, mainly about Maltese cuisine, was her day job. In her free time, she posted articles to a blog called Running Commentary, a website that made her Malta's most prominent investigative reporter and, as Politico wrote in one recent profile, “a one-woman WikiLeaks”.

On some days, the site drew more than 400,000 readers, a figure that dwarfed the audience of Malta's main newspapers and nearly equaled the country's population. Her posts ranged from commentary on the country's “19th-century” treatment of women to more salacious items, including a report that a Maltese government minister was seen in a German brothel. The minister denied the story and in February received a warrant to freeze Mrs. Caruana Galizia's bank accounts.

Her recent work was fueled by the Panama Papers, a 2016 leak of more than 11 million documents that linked government officials around the world to secretive offshore shell companies. Mrs. Caruana Galizia's work occurred independently of the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative effort led by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), in partnership with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media organizations. (Her son Matthew is a software developer and data journalist with ICIJ.)

In blog posts based on documents from the Panama Papers, she tied Muscat's government — including his wife, chief of staff and energy minister — to several shell companies. She alleged that officials had been receiving illicit payments funneled by the government of Azerbaijan, a former Soviet satellite state.

Officials denied the charges, and Mrs. Caruana Galizia soon faced a deluge of libel threats and suits. In addition, her bull terrier was poisoned and nearly killed earlier this year, Matthew Caruana Galizia said, and one of her younger sons, a Maltese diplomat, was recalled from his post in New Delhi without explanation. Before her death, Matthew said, his mother had planned to sue the government, arguing that the diplomatic ouster was intended as retaliation for her reporting.

“Everyone knows Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way,” Muscat said after Mrs. Caruana Galizia's death.

Malta's government had been in a state of near-disarray since Mrs. Caruana Galizia began publishing her allegations, with Muscat holding snap elections in June in an attempt to solidify his four-year hold on power. Shortly before the election, Ken Mifsud Bonnici, an adviser to the European Commission, wrote that Malta was facing “a veritable collapse of the rule of law”.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Matthew Caruana Galizia wrote that his mother “was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists.” He blamed the “incompetence and negligence” of the police and government for her death.

“This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated,” he continued: “The last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.”

Daphne Anne Vella was born in the resort town of Sliema on August 26th, 1964. Her father owned a business that imported and installed elevators, and her mother was a homemaker. She married Peter Caruana Galizia in 1985.

Mrs. Caruana Galizia joined the Times of Malta two years later, working as a reporter and then a columnist before moving to the Malta Independent as an associate editor in 1992. As a columnist, she developed a flair for fiery, opinionated writing that carried over to her blog.

In 1997, she received a bachelor's degree in archaeology from the University of Malta.

In addition to her husband, survivors include their three sons and her mother and father.

Mrs. Caruana Galizia's last post, published a half-hour before her death, described her increasing frustration over a lack of accountability for government corruption. In a court hearing that morning, the prime minister's chief of staff, Keith Schembri, said he had not been able to respond to accusations of corruption because of a “medical condition”.

“There are crooks everywhere you look now,” she wrote. “The situation is desperate.”

• Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. He was born in Dallas and joined The Post in 2015.

CHARLES MANSON was an unlikely figure to evolve into the personification of evil. A few inches over five feet, he was a petty criminal and small-time hustler. And his followers bore little resemblance to the stereotypical image of hardened killers. Most were in their early twenties, middle-class white kids, hippies and runaways who fell under his charismatic sway.

But in the summer of 1969, Manson masterminded a string of bizarre murders in Los Angeles that both horrified and fascinated the nation and signified to many the symbolic end of the 1960s and the idealism and naiveté the decade represented.

Considered one of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century, Manson died of natural causes at a Kern County hospital at 8:13 p.m on Sunday, according to Vicky Waters, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was 83.

Sentenced to death for the crime, Manson escaped execution when the state Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional at the time. He spent decades behind bars, an unrepentant and incorrigible inmate who'd been cited for behavioral issues more than 100 times.

Manson did not commit the murders himself; instead he persuaded his group of followers to carry out the killings. The crimes received frenzied news coverage, because so many lurid and sensational elements coalesced at the time — Hollywood celebrity, cult behavior, group sex, drugs and savage murders that concluded with the killers scrawling words with their victims' blood.

Los Angeles residents were terrified by the crimes. Before the killers were apprehended, gun sales and guard dog purchases skyrocketed and locksmiths had weeks-long waiting lists. Numerous off-duty police officers were hired to guard homes in affluent neighborhoods and security firms tripled in size.

Manson and four of his followers — Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles “Tex” Watson — were convicted of murdering actress Sharon Tate, the wife of movie director Roman Polanski, in their Bel-Air home on August 9, 1969, along with four others.

Watson had been a high school football star. Krenwinkel a former Sunday school teacher. Van Houten a homecoming princess from Monrovia. And Atkins once sang in her church choir. Linda Kasabian, a pregnant 20-year-old with a baby daughter, who said she was asked to go along that night because she was the only one with a valid driver's license, testified against the others in return for immunity from prosecution. Atkins died in 2009 in prison; the others remain incarcerated.

Tate, 26, who was eight months pregnant, pleaded with her killers to spare the life of her unborn baby. Atkins replied, “Woman, I have no mercy for you.” Tate was stabbed 16 times. “PIG” was written in her blood on the front door.

The next night they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their Los Feliz home. Manson picked the house at random, tied up the couple and then left the killings to the others. They cut “WAR” in Leno LaBianca's flesh and left a carving fork in his stomach and a knife in his throat. Using the LaBiancas' blood, they scrawled on the wall and refrigerator in blood “DEATH TO PIGS” and “HEALTER SKELTER”, the mis-spelled title of a Beatles song. Before leaving, they helped themselves to some watermelon in the refrigerator, leaving behind the rinds.

“People were so terrified because these seemed to be murders without a motive,” said lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who died in 2015. “They weren't robberies or burglaries. It was so random. If you're not safe in your home, where are you safe? And these murders were particularly brutal. On the two nights there were 169 stab wounds.”

The 9½-month trial — the longest in U.S. history at the time — was as bizarre as the crimes.

A group of young female followers with shaved heads gathered outside the courthouse and conducted a 24-hour vigil for Manson. One morning Manson entered the court room with an X carved into his forehead and his followers soon did the same. During the trial, Manson jumped over his attorney's table and made a dash for the bench. While the bailiffs were dragging him out of the courtroom, Manson shouted to Judge Charles H. Older, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should chop off your head!” The judge began packing a .38-caliber revolver under his robe. Van Houten's attorney, Ronald Hughes, disappeared during the trial and was later found dead. Prosecutors suspected he was another Manson victim.

Bugliosi argued during the trial that Manson orchestrated the murders as part of a plan to spark a race war that he called Helter Skelter. Blacks would win the war even though, according to Manson, they were inferior to whites. Then he and his followers would survive by living underground near Death Valley and would eventually take over power. In a later trial, Manson was convicted in the slayings of musician Gary Hinman and Donald “Shorty” Shea, who worked at the San Fernando Valley ranch where the family lived for a time.

In 1972, the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the state Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Since then, Manson and his followers have been eligible for parole hearings. Only one of those convicted in the nine murders — Steve Grogan, who was involved in the Shea shooting — has been paroled. Atkins died in 2009 while incarcerated in Chowchilla.

Manson — who had spent more than half of his life in prison before the conviction — was housed at Corcoran State Prison since 1989. He broke prison rules dozens of times for violations including possessing cellular phones and a hacksaw blade, throwing hot coffee at a staff member, spitting in a guard's face, fighting, refusing to obey orders and trying to flood a tier in his cellblock. Long ago, he turned the X on his forehead into a swastika. He was denied parole 12 times and had numerous disciplinary violations. His last parole hearing was in 2012, which he declined to attend.

Sharon Tate, right, is shown with film director Roman Polanski at their wedding in London in 1968. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

The body of actress Sharon Tate is removed from her Benedict Canyon estate where she and four other people were murderedduring the night of August 9, 1969. The next night, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were slain. — Photograph: Associated Press.

Doris Tate, Sharon's mother, became a victims' rights advocate after the murders and helped collect more than 350,000 signatures on petitions opposing parole for Manson and his followers. After her death in 1992, her daughter Patti Tate appeared at Manson family hearings opposing parole.

More than 40 years after the mass murders, Manson — whose wild-eyed stare was immortalized on a Life magazine cover — remains a figure of fascination, a homicidal anti-hero for a new generation. Rock groups have played songs that he wrote. Merchants peddle T-shirts bearing Manson's likeness, as well as belt buckles, caps, necklaces, rosaries and cigarette lighters. Manson memorabilia is sold on the internet.

“Manson became a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure,” said Bugliosi, who wrote — with Curt Gentry — the bestselling non-fiction book “Helter Skelter” about the case. “People found him so fascinating because unlike other mass murderers who did the killings themselves or participated with others, Manson got people to kill for him.”

Manson received in prison an average of four fan letters a day, said Stephen Kay, who helped prosecute the case. When he turned 80, Manson and a 27-year-old fan obtained a marriage license. But it expired before the paperwork was completed.

Kay said he attended 60 parole hearings to argue against Manson family members' release before retiring from the district attorney's office in 2005. Manson, Kay said, evolved into the focal point of satanic worship in the U.S.

“At one parole hearing outside San Quentin in the late 1980s, there were about 40 satanic worshipers dressed in black outside the prison chanting for his release,” Kay said. “Then there's these young people today who are intrigued by his mystique since he's America's most famous criminal. But they don't know what he's really about, what he really did.”

Manson has been portrayed as the dark prince of the counterculture, the sinister consequences of a permissive era. The man and his crimes, however, are more a product of parental neglect, a failed foster care system and barbaric juvenile justice institutions.

Charles Manson was born on November 12, 1934, to an impoverished 16-year-old single mother named Kathleen Maddox. “No Name Maddox” appeared on the Cincinnati hospital's birth certificate because the father had not been identified. His mother later was briefly married to a man who provided his stepson with a last name.

Shortly after Manson was born, Kathleen would tell relatives she had to run off for an hour or two, leave her son, and then return days or weeks later. When Manson was 5, his mother and her brother robbed a West Virginia service station and knocked the attendant unconscious with a Coke bottle. They were sentenced to five years in state prison. Manson was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. The happiest day of his life, he has said, was when his mother was released from prison. The feeling did not last long. He spent the next few years in tow, as his mother embarked on a journey through the Midwest, staying at a series of seedy hotel rooms and drinking heavily.

“By the time I was 12 I'd missed a lot of school, seen a few juvenile homes and no longer believed all my mom's lovers were ‘uncles’,” he said in “Manson in His Own Words”, as told to Nuel Emmons. “One night I was awakened by the sound of [my mother and her current boyfriend] arguing. The words I remember most were his: ‘I'm telling you, I’m moving on. You and I could make it just fine, but I can't stand that sneaky kid of yours’.”

His mother then attempted to place him in foster care, but no home was available, so the court sent Manson to a facility for troubled boys in Indiana. After 10 months, he ran away and returned to his mother, but she told him she didn't want him. He ran off again, broke into a grocery store for enough cash to rent a room. After a series of burglaries, armed robberies, arrests and escapes from juvenile institutions, he was sent to a reform school in Indiana.

Manson was only 13, a small, slight, unhappy boy. He was frequently beaten with a strap by the staff and, shortly after he arrived, he was gang-raped by several older boys, he wrote. After a guard discovered the assault, he told Manson, “You, Manson, go wash your face and stop all your crying.”

During his three years in reform school, he ran away 18 times. By the time he was 18 he had been transformed from prey into predator. He was convicted of holding a razor blade to the throat of another boy and raping him. When he was finally released from reform school, he wasn't out for long. He was arrested for stealing cars and violating parole and, at the age of 22, was sentenced to his first term at an adult prison: three years at the Terminal Island federal penitentiary. Older inmates taught him how to be a pimp, and during a few brief interludes between prison sentences he had turned a few girls out on the street.

Manson's music and his quasi-spiritual rap, which later had impressed followers, were forged during his stays in prisons during the next decade. At McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, he met Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, the sole survivor of the Ma Barker gang, who taught him how to play steel guitar. He read science fiction and books on Eastern religion and learned about Scientology from a bank robber. On a prison form, he listed his religion as “Scientologist”.

Manson was married twice before he was sentenced to the Terminal Island federal prison and had a son with each wife.

In 1967, he was scheduled to be released from Terminal Island with no friends or family on the outside who wanted to see him, no trade and no prospects for a job.

“I told the officer who was signing me out, ‘You know what, man, I don't want to leave!’,” Manson wrote. “‘I don't have a home out there! Why don't you just take me back inside’. The officer laughed and thought I was kidding. ‘I'm serious, man! I mean it, I don't want to leave!’ My plea was ignored.”

He hitchhiked to Berkeley during the Summer of Love, a time when the Bay Area was a mecca for young, idealistic hippies. They were easy prey for a street-smart conman like Manson. He soon put to use everything he had learned in prison. He played guitar on the street to attract women, intrigued them with his metaphysical monologues and, like the pimp he once was, manipulated and exploited young women and used them to attract male followers.

The followers took copious amounts of LSD, but Manson always abstained or took a much smaller dose and then orchestrated orgies in order, he claimed, to break down sexual taboos. The family survived by petty crimes and raiding supermarket dumpsters. Before the Summer of Love was over, Manson had eight followers, most of them women. They piled into an old school bus and roamed the West Coast before ending up in Los Angeles.

In the spring of 1968, two female Manson family members who were hitchhiking were picked up by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. They introduced him to Manson and the family briefly lived with Wilson at his Pacific Palisades home. Wilson introduced Manson to Terry Melcher, a record producer who was Doris Day's son, and Manson played a few of the songs he wrote. Melcher had considered signing him, but eventually passed, embittering Manson. The family eventually moved to the Spahn Ranch, a little-used 500-acre property in the Santa Susana Mountains above Chatsworth.

In August 1969, Manson handed Watson a gun and a knife. “He said for me to take the gun and knife and go up to where Terry Melcher used to live,” Watson testified. “He said to kill everybody in the house as gruesome as I could. I believe he said something about movie stars living there.”

There was a secondary motive for the Tate murders, Bugliosi wrote in “Helter Skelter”: “As Susan Atkins put it … ‘The reason Charlie picked that house was to instill fear into Terry Melcher because Terry had given us his word on a few things and never came through with them.’ But this was obviously not the primary motive, since … Manson knew that Melcher was no longer living at the [house].”

Along with Tate, they killed Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairdresser; Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski; Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s girlfriend and the heir to the Folger coffee fortune; and Steven Parent, 18, who was visiting the resident of the guest house and was just leaving the property.

The next night Manson led followers to a Los Feliz neighborhood he was familiar with, picked a house at random and tied up the LaBiancas with leather thongs. After Manson took off, the couple was murdered.

“Many people I know in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote in “The White Album”, “believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when the word of the murders … traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true…. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

More than 40 years later, the notoriety of Charles Manson and the murders he plotted endures.

“Most homicides and trials get a lot of attention and then fade,” Bugliosi said. “Maniacs who kill to satisfy their urges do not resonate. Manson was different. As misguided as the murders were, he claimed that they were political and revolutionary, that he was trying to change the social order, not merely satisfy a homicidal urge. That appeals to the crazies on the fringes of society.”

Manson was nonchalant after he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to San Quentin's death row. He told prosecutors they were simply sending him home.

“Prison is my home,” he once said in an interview, “the only home I ever had.”

CHARLES MANSON died on Sunday night after being admitted to a hospital in Bakersfield on Wednesday. The infamous cult leader, who was convicted along with three of his followers in 1971 of the murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others, was 83 years old.

How do we assess Manson? If early reports are any indication, it is with the same lack of nuance, the same hyperbole on which we've long relied. The Associated Press described him on Thursday as “a demonic presence, the living embodiment of evil” and quoted former special correspondent Linda Deutsch, who covered his trial: “In addition to killing seven people, he killed a whole counterculture.”

The temptation to see Manson in apocalyptic terms is understandable.

In her 1978 essay “The White Album”, Joan Didion wrote, “On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a phone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive…. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed.”

In a nation now grappling with mass killings one after another, the actual number of Manson's victims seems almost minimal, even quaint. But it's worth remembering the terror stirred by the murders, the chaos they implied. Tate was 8½ months pregnant when she died; the killers wrote “Pig” across the front door in her blood. The following night, the Manson family killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca at their home in Los Feliz, scrawling “Healter Skelter” (sic) on the refrigerator, also using the victims' blood.

I was a child on the other side of the country, and I recall my own fear in the wake of the killings, the disturbing satanic details, the violation of the safety of home.

That my children now take such realities for granted suggests something of how desensitized we as a culture have become.

Manson, though, was no devil but a human being, as his death makes clear. I don't say that to soften or absolve him. But I don't believe in demons; people are frightening enough. Indeed, to accept Manson as a person, to see him through the filter of his humanity, is to acknowledge what we resist: that he was perhaps not so utterly different from the rest of us.

Manson's history was horrific; his mother did time in prison for armed robbery when he was young and he lived with relatives who tormented him in the name of making him tough. In the 2013 biography “Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson” Jeff Guinn traced one such incident, in which his uncle made him go to first grade in a dress as punishment for having cried in class.

A quarter-century later, after his release from the federal penitentiary at Terminal Island in San Pedro, Manson moved to San Francisco and began to collect the drifters and young women who would become his so-called family.

Among his successful strategies? Convincing his acolytes to commit the murders he planned, then claiming innocence since he did not actually kill anyone.

This is, of course, horrific, venal — and recognizably human at the same time. Just look at the news; evasion of responsibility is our new national pastime. You might say Manson was ahead of his time, spinning out a series of false narratives about race war and his own messianic status that ensnared his followers.

Although much has been made of his efforts to join the Southern California music scene (he befriended Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, among others), it's a stretch to suggest Manson's turn to murder was a reaction to his failed rock star fantasies.

And those who blame it all on the counterculture are equally misguided. The hippies had their dark side — just look at all the people who got lost in drugs and dissolution — but Manson did not so much reflect that as prey upon it. All he really had in common with the “peace and love” ethos were its trappings: sex, drugs, long hair and an obsessive fascination with the Beatles, whose lyrics he interpreted as a series of coded messages.

For those who have faith in an afterlife, I suppose there's some solace in imagining he will get his karmic comeuppance. But perhaps it would make more sense to see him as an agent of the hells we create on Earth.

Manson was a killer, yes, and he was a psychopath, but he was never otherworldly. The violence and the hatred he embodied may be his most human attribute.

• David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion at the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles Times is full of articles and features about Charles Manson at the moment. Quite understandable, I suppose, when you consider the infamous murders occured in the Los Angeles basin. However, I've got a subscription to the Los Angeles Times and as well as unrestricted access to their online articles and their vast archive of news stories dating way back into the 19th century, I get access to an e-format version of the print edition when it comes out each day, usually sometime between 9pm and 10pm (NZ-time). I was sound asleep when the print edition was released last night (due to the fact I was starting work at 4am), but after I got the first three trains ready to go this morning and placed the first service to the platform, I had 45-minutes to spare until departure time of that train, so I logged-in and gained access to Monday's print edition. In it, I discovered the two articles posted above, so I read them. They provide an insight into why Charles Manson turned out to be the person he was. I guess it shows that if you abuse a kid, they can get programmed to be an arsehole as they grow up.

Charles Manson is led to court for a preliminary hearing on December 3, 1969. — Photograph: John Malmin/Los Angeles Times.

HE could have been just another grifter.

When Charles Manson rolled into California from Appalachia in 1955 in a stolen Mercury, his big ambition was to be a pimp.

In prison at Terminal Island for trying to cash a forged $43 check, he talked tradecraft with the veteran pimps inside, dabbled in Scientology and read Dale Carnegie's “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, waiting to get out and try what he learned on vulnerable women.

Sprung in 1967, he visited a parolee he knew who happened to be living in Berkeley. If the convict had resided in Fresno or Barstow, Manson might have seen his modest criminal ambitions come to be, and the world at large would never have heard his name.

But Manson landed dead center in the country's countercultural carnival, just a couple of months before the Summer of Love. The moment he saw the sidewalk gurus in Haight-Ashbury luring young flocks of believers, he found a new calling, the perfect gig for a conniver desperate for attention.

The ensuing free-for-all of sex, drugs and Dumpster-diving lasted less than two years. As Manson's family started to sputter like its converted school bus, he kept it running on a fuel of doomsday prophecies, convincing his followers that an apocalyptic race war called “Helter Skelter” was coming.

He masterminded a killing rampage to serve his most insectile needs.

He had to get a killer who was likely to snitch on him released from jail, by making it appear as if the real culprit were still at large. And he needed to keep his believers from realizing he was a fraud, by making his own prophecy come true. He orchestrated the murders to look as if they were committed by black militants.

The wretched motive behind the murders was a simple con job.

But the fact that he and his family looked like hippies and did lots of LSD gave a new breed of magazine journalists just what they wanted to see: the dark side to the youth movement they'd helped invent.

Manson became the first of many people and events to end the '60s.

To stay in the limelight, he played the madman role to epic effect.

But he didn't have preternatural brainwashing powers.

He didn't turn California into the Paradise Lost that so many writers had been waiting for.

He didn't even terrify the state in the way a true sadist, Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” would 15 years later.

He was a scab mite who bit at the perfect time and place to be enshrined in baby boomer lore.

MANSON grew up without a father, with an alcoholic mother who was in and out of prison. He was shoplifting by age 9 and relentlessly acting out for attention. Pinwheeling in and out of institutions, he never lasted long on the streets. As a slightly built young man in reform schools and then prison, he learned to spook predators by acting insane.

Before he was released for the final time in 1967, Manson had become enthralled with the Beatles and the worship they evoked in young people. He decided he was going to be even more famous than the Fab Four, and this quest — the archetypal Hollywood story — is what turned so evil.

He used the hippie-guru role as an entree into showbiz circles.

In San Francisco, at 32, Manson looked for those women who were “broken” and alone — anyone with a bad or missing father was a key target. He listened to them, told plain-looking women they were beautiful, acted as if he understood their depths and filled the role of father.

They called him Jesus Christ and took off in an old black school bus to claim his stardom in Los Angeles, where the scab mite, like so many others, crawled around looking for hosts.

They found a place to crash with hippies in Topanga Canyon, a house called the Spiral Staircase. They scooped up new girls willing to submit themselves to Manson's sexual initiation.

His biggest break came when Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys, picked up two of Manson's girls hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard. He took them back to his house, an old hunting lodge in Pacific Palisades that was once part of Will Rogers' old ranch. They left without recognizing his name. But Manson knew who he was.

Later that night, when Wilson pulled into his driveway in his Ferrari, the house lights were on. Manson emerged from the house, according to biographer Jeff Guinn, “smiling and waving as if he were the host greeting a guest.”

The family moved in and lived off Wilson's wealth for months, while Manson relentlessly worked him and his friends — Gregg Jacobson, a songwriting partner, and Terry Melcher, a wunderkind producer — for a record deal. He ordered his “girls” to have sex with them whenever the men wanted, wrote Guinn in “Manson: His Life and Times”

Manson talked his way into jam sessions with Neil Young, the Mamas and the Papas and others.

Young recalled him being “a little uptight, a little too intense,” according to Young's biography, yet he and Wilson saw potential in Manson's singing. The ones who could actually give him a record deal did not. They strung him along, enjoying the girls, avoiding confrontation.

Wilson got tired of Manson leeching off him and moved out of the rented house instead of confronting him. The family took up residence at the Spahn Ranch near Chatsworth, where many of Hollywood's westerns — “Bonanza”, “The Lone Ranger”, “Zorro” — had been filmed. The girls made their stay worthwhile to the old, half-blind owner.

Every night, Manson gave his “children” LSD before his daily sermons, so that his banal and incoherent ramblings would be received as the word of God. He said his record would tell the world about the war to come.

Manson was quickly reaching a turning point in the cult game. The prospect of a record deal was slipping away, and some of his followers were becoming antsy, even dubious.

“The constant danger for gurus is that they must keep producing new wonders for their followers,” Guinn wrote. “They can't let the act get stale or seem to be wrong about something or, worst of all, to fail publicly.”

So he doubled down on Helter Skelter. They needed to start preparing.

They found an isolated compound in the Panamint Mountains of Death Valley, and his followers began earnestly looking for the opening to a bottomless pit where they would hide.

At the same time, Manson was still desperately trying to get an audition with Melcher.

When Melcher agreed to watch him perform at Spahn Ranch in May of 1969, Manson stopped all preparations for Helter Skelter. He still just wanted to be famous.

But Melcher left unimpressed.

Events spiraled quickly after that.

Manson started shaking down anyone he could for money to get the dune buggies and supplies they needed for the desert. He had an associate, Bobby Beausoleil, go to Topanga and hold the owner of the Spiral Staircase hostage until he gave up all his money.

When the owner threatened to go to police, Manson told Beausoleil, “You know what to do.” Beausoleil stabbed him to death and wrote “POLITICAL PIGGY” in blood, with a paw print, the symbol of the Black Panthers, to pin the murder on black militants.

Beausoleil was arrested near San Luis Obispo with the victim's Fiat. The bloody knife was in the tire well. Manson panicked, knowing police would pressure him to talk. Feeling caged, he sent his followers out to kill more people on two hot August nights, scrawling similar notes, so it looked as if the true killer was still stalking prey and police would be forced to release Beausoleil. And this would foment Helter Skelter, and his “children” would see that he truly was God.

But most important, Manson didn't commit the murders himself, so in his mind, he wouldn't go to prison for them.

Nine people died in the carnage, including the actress Sharon Tate. The lurid details of the first night's murders at the Tate house — “PIGS” scrawled in blood on a wall; speed, pot and LSD found in the Porsche of one of the slain — set off wild rumors and paranoia around Los Angeles.

“The murder was still etched across every conversation three months after the event, with the killers still at large to make nightmares of the city,” wrote Barry Farrell in Life magazine.

Speculation ran rampant about the sexual and drug proclivities of Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski, and Hollywood in general.

“Every story promotes the murders into assassinations, crimes of logical consequence in which some vision of the victims' way of living makes them accomplices in their own deaths,” Farrell wrote. “It is as if no one is satisfied with the crime until it can be perceived as a political act — the murder of a lifestyle.”

Joan Didion described the sense that drugs and open sex had upended the old traditions so swiftly that anything could happen.

“Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable,” she wrote in “The White Album”. “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’ — this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far’, and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…. The jitters were setting in.”

The morning Los Angeles woke to hear of five people murdered on Cielo Drive, “the tension broke,” Didion wrote. “The paranoia was fulfilled.”

But when the Manson family was arrested for the crimes four months later, the critical gaze shifted from the sins of Hollywood to the sins of America's youth — the fear that any flower child from Sioux City or Peoria could be brainwashed into becoming a sex-crazed killer.

“The Dark Edge of the Hippie Life”, Life magazine proclaimed on its cover about the Manson family.

“The Los Angeles killings struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their children,” wrote the magazine's Paul O'Neill, “and made Charlie Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.”

Speed, needles and the violent ethos of hard drugs had already taken over in Haight-Ashbury.

Just five days after police connected the murders to Manson, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival opened, billed as “Woodstock West”. But fights erupted in the crowd, and the Hells Angels, hired for security, brawled with spectators, fatally stabbing a man who had pulled a gun.

In psychedelic terms, the end of 1969 turned into the sour acid trip that had you lockjawed in terror.

During that one week that December, the '60s died twice. And so began the sense of a cultural skid-out, tracking from the Spahn Ranch to the drug deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and buckets of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in Jonestown, Guyana.

Manson went to trial with three followers involved in the murders. The trial was a freak show like America would not see until the Jerry Springer era. Manson, a fresh X gouged in his forehead, relished the crowds that had come to see him. He ranted and made threats and crazy demands. His main soldier, Susan Atkins, fell into histrionic cries of stomach pain at one point. Other female family members converged outside the Hall of Justice — copycat Xs in their foreheads — posing for pictures with gawkers, playing patty-cake on the sidewalk.

Manson and the three others were sentenced to die in the gas chamber, but when the death penalty was abolished in 1972, he would get his regular parole hearings and TV interviews, and the public was sentenced to never forget him.

He embellished his X into a swastika, and kept up the insane act he learned as a kid — telegraphing the reality stars to come — a tabloid mainstay, a scab mite itching our consciousness to the very end.

After the murders, songs by the Beach Boys hanger-on drew morbid curiosity.

By RANDALL ROBERTS | 2:00AM PST — Tuesday, November 21, 2017

STARTING IN THE 1970s, not long after Charles Manson directed his followers to murder seven people over two bloody nights in Los Angeles, the convicted killer's music and notoriety fueled a small underground industry.

The allure was centered on Manson's only album, recorded in Los Angeles in 1967 and '68 and issued a year after the 1969 murders. Manson, it turns out, was a failed folk rock artist who desperately sought the attention of a Los Angeles music scene then thriving in the studios, labels and clubs along Sunset Boulevard.

He didn't get it, and that rejection by insiders including the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and record producer (and Doris Day's son) Terry Melcher helped ignite Manson's rage.

Called “Lie: The Love and Terror Cult”, Manson's album was issued on an imprint branded Awareness and featured 14 Manson originals, including “Gar-bage Dump”, “Sick City” and “Look at Your Game, Girl”.

Songs from it have been covered by bands including Guns N' Roses and the Lemonheads, and punk singer-writer-DJ Henry Rollins produced some Manson jailhouse recordings that have never been officially released.

Most notably, “Lie” features a Manson-penned song titled “Cease to Exist”, which became the center of a dispute between him and the Beach Boys after the band reworked the song, changing lyrics, the tone and renaming it “Never Learn Not to Love”.

Manson had barged his way into the world of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson after the musician picked up two women hitchhikers from Manson's posse. For a while he and members of the so-called family lived at Wilson's Sunset Boulevard home (which was formerly Will Rogers' hunting lodge). Manson even lobbied to be on the Beach Boys' imprint, Brother Records.

During a 2016 interview with The Wall Street Journal, the Beach Boys' Mike Love recalled going to a dinner party with bandmate Bruce Johnston at Dennis Wilson's house. The Manson family was there, and after dinner, he said, most took LSD.

“We were the only ones with clothes on,” Love, who declined the drug, said of his and Johnston's arrival. “It was quite unusual.”

The Beach Boys issued “Never Learn Not to Love” as the B-side to “Bluebirds on the Mountain” in early December 1968. Manson was said to be furious that the Beach Boys hadn't credited him for his work, and that they'd changed some of his precious words. “Submission is a gift,” Manson's version goes. “Go on, give it to your brother / Love and understanding / Is for one another.”

Within months of the release, Manson's family had stolen some of Dennis Wilson's gold records, totaled his Mercedes and cost him a reported $100,000.

The murders of victims including Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca occurred in the summer of 1969. The No.1 record at the time was Zager & Evans' one-hit wonder “In the Year 2525”.

Manson and many family members were arrested in October of that year. Jury selection into his role in the murders began in June 1970.

It was around then that the owner of Awareness, Phil Kaufman, pressed Manson's album. Kaufman was a famous tour manager, perhaps best known for absconding with the body of the late country rocker Gram Parsons after he died at the Joshua Tree Inn — and then lighting fire to the artist and his coffin in the desert.

Kaufman came to put out “Lie” after meeting Manson in the mid-1960s at the Terminal Island federal correctional facility near the L.A. harbor. Kaufman was in prison for a felony marijuana conviction, and Manson was jailed for crimes including forgery and pimping.

After Manson was arrested in the murders but before being convicted for his part of them, recalled Kaufman in a 2013 interview, “we made a deal. [Manson] said, ‘Put out my record and you can have all the rights to my music’. So I did.”

Kaufman remembered pressing a few thousand copies — but said that “half of those were stolen by the family when they broke into my house. They tried three more times, and the last time I chased them off with a gun, so I never saw them again.”

A year later a Spanish label called Movieplay issued a European version titled “12 Canciones Compuestas y Cantadas por Charles Manson”. The noted avant-garde label ESP-Disk put out an edition in the early 1970s, and the notorious imprint Come Organization issued a version in 1981. During the compact disc era, the record is said to have sold thousands of copies.

The mid-1980s saw the release of a record of songs by Manson's followers called “The Manson Family Sings the Songs of Charles Manson”. Recorded in 1970 and featuring home-recorded renditions of Manson's unpublished songs, the album features contributions from family members including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Sandra Good and Steve “Clem” Grogan.

By law, Manson wasn't allowed to collect royalties — those are supposed to go to victims' families — but a number of well-known and respected artists have used Manson's music and image for shock value, ensuring his songs are not totally forgotten.

In the 1980s and '90s, the Manson family's mystique fueled a mythology that inspired art by Sonic Youth, Front Line Assembly, the punk artist Raymond Pettibon and his brother Greg Ginn's band Black Flag.

“Cease to Exist” has been covered by artists including Redd Kross, the Lemonheads and G.G. Allin. Guns N' Roses recorded “Look at Your Game, Girl” for its record “The Spaghetti Incident?”

Trent Reznor made his classic album “The Downward Spiral” at the Benedict Canyon home where Manson's followers murdered Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time.

Reznor's seeming glorification ended during a random encounter with Tate’s sister. According to Reznor in a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone, she said, “‘Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?’ For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face,” Reznor said, adding that “I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bull….”

And long removed from teenage rebellion, Redd Kross member Jeff McDonald expressed regret for covering Manson to MTV in 2012. The band's take on “Cease to Exist” appears on 1982's “Born Innocent”, and McDonald said the move was largely done to annoy the band members' parents.

“It was more just the aesthetic and we did it and dropped it after a while. But we're associated with it, which is kind of a bummer,” McDonald told MTV, adding, that he eventually concluded that “we can't perpetuate this thing.”

Manson's “Lie: The Love and Terror Cult” is currently available on all the major streaming services through a deal with ESP-Disk, which was approached by Awareness Records' Kaufman for better distribution and has since reissued it on CD and vinyl.

This reporter's opinion: The record's not very good, filled with drug-addled, period-piece rants about loss of ego, the comfort of home (“And as long as you got love in your heart / You'll never be alone”) and eating food from trash cans (“I don't even care who wins the war / I'll be in them cans behind my favorite store”).

In the '90s when I worked in a St. Louis record store, we couldn't keep “Lie” in stock. Young, impressionable punks — dudes, mostly — lapped it up. They also bought records by hardcore band Ed Gein's Car and songs about the New York killer known as the Son of Sam and Utah murderer Gary Gilmore.

Minus Manson's background, all evidence suggests the cult leader didn't have the talent to make it in the business.

“Mechanical Man” features this god-awful series of couplets:

I had a little monkeyAnd I sent him to the countryAnd I fed him ginger breadAlong came a choo chooAnd knocked my monkey koo kooAnd now my monkey's dead.

When it comes to Manson and the murders, silver linings are hard to come by. But at least his decades in prison had one positive: his chance to release more music ceased to exist.

• Randall Roberts is a staff writer covering music for the Los Angeles Times, and pens the weekly California Sounds music column.